Event Phone: 0863389619

Mary Coughlan

Raheen House Hotel, Clonmel

Thursday 19th May 2022

Cancelled.

Ticket holders have been refunded

 

 

 

 

Mary Coughlans latest album, Life Stories,  was released in 2020 exactly  35 years after Mary’s debut album, Tired and Emotional catapulted her to fame in 1985.

Mary reflects on the album that forever altered her life story.

“I was moving from Galway to Dublin, and my friend Alan was helping me bring up stuff in his Citroën van,” she recalls. “I was looking at homes and mum was minding the kids, but I got a slap in the face at that first gig – there were only four people there. Then my mam called and said I was on the radio. Mark Cagney was playing the album – and he’d play a whole side of it each night. Suddenly there were queues of people at the gigs, and then I was asked to go on The Late Late Show. It did take me by surprise. It came so quickly, and was ‘overnight’. We were on the road for weeks. I had a band and crew of 14, and we lived on a bus touring England, Denmark, Holland, and Finland. It was one giant party and it never stopped.”

Her latest album, Life Stories was released on 04^th September 2020 and got to number one in the Irish ITunes and amazon ! Life Stories is by turns powerful, swaggering, sexy, harrowingly raw, and deeply honest, running the full gamut of emotions from cabaret (‘High Heel Boots’ ) to late night jazz balladry (‘Elbow Deep’, ‘No Jericho’ ) to some of the most exuberant pop orientated songs Mary has yet done (‘Forward Bound’, ‘Steps Forward’ )

 

Mary Coughlan is our greatest female singer because over thirty-seven years and seventeen albums she’s made the most grown-up, uncompromising, wholly personal and utterly universal music on either side of the Atlantic about what goes on between men and women.

Born in Galway 66 years ago, Mary has battled and overcome childhood trauma, near-death from alcoholism and drug addiction. Mary Coughlan’s genius is the ability to sing out those feelings, that pain, in such a powerful way that the listener somehow feels inside Mary’s head as she revisits the wreckage of her past.

 Mary has carved out a timeless and highly regarded career, with a legion of devoted fans worldwide. Her ability to connect so emotionally & empathically with both the song & her audience is testament to her inner strength, and to the power of transformation & redemption. The stage is her home. To hear Mary sing is truly to be at the core of the human spirit and heart.

 Her first album, Tired and emotional. sold 100,000 copies in Ireland in 1985. She has recorded 16 further solo albums. Throughout the 90’s, Mary was selling out some of the UK’s most prestigious venues, including the Mean Fiddler, London’s Astoria and the Liverpool Philharmonic. She has since gone on to tour in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Scandinavia and the U.K.

 She has taken the classic standards of jazz balladry and the recent gems of rock and Irish song-writing, shaken them and offered them up anew, like jewels dripping from the deep, strewn on black velvet. She sings in the voice of the wrong and wronged woman and she makes us think what it is men make of women and what women have to do to make do.

But this is not why Mary Coughlan is the greatest female vocalist these islands have ever produced. It’s not even why she stands alongside, or even between, the bruised, battered but unbeaten giants of jazz chanson on both sides of the Atlantic, Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf. Mary Coughlan is the only singer these shores have produced to rival the greatest of European cabaret and American jazz club blues because of one thing: her voice. She is unique in blending the whisky-blurred, smoke-seared, husky notes and laconic wit of Billie Holiday and Peggy Lee and the line of deep, down and dirty blues singers back to Memphis Minnie and Bessie Smith with the sardonic, bitter-sweet defiance and despair of the Piaf chanteuse, born out of war, in the shadow of Brecht, at war with the world, men and finally herself. And Mary Coughlan enfolds it all in a delicious and unapologetic Irish drawl, sceptical, rueful, mournful and melting, ardent for love, all in one voice which wraps itself around Cole Porter and Jerome Kern, Elvis Presley and Joy Division, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and sails down that long river of blues that links the Mississippi to the Liffey in her magnificent Galway accent.

Mary Coughlan is a true artist and an incorrigible disturber of the peace. Her grace and courage in the face of the challenges that life has thrown at her have endeared to fans in Ireland and around the world. In her native land, she is treasured not just a musician of rare sensitivity and talent, but as someone who gives a voice to difficult subjects and uncomfortable truths about Irish society. One thing is for sure, you will be taken on a journey of devastatingly beautiful, wide-ranging and engaging songs, from a woman who has battled her demons and won, transforming them into art, an enduring testament to Mary Coughlan’s seemingly timeless and endless brilliance.

 

In June 2020, Mary’s achievements and immense impact on the culture and arts community in Galway City were recognised by the Mayor, Mike Hubbard, who presented her with a 2020 lifetime achievement award.

 

“Ireland has never produced a singer quite like Mary Coughlan. Indeed anything like Mary Coughlan. .” -Irish Times

Tom Waits has met his Irish match.” * * * *The UK Guardian

 

“The emotional purity in Mary Coughlan’s songs is so fragile that it is possible to become inconsolable when listening to her in a darkened room.” – Q Magazine

 

“A song is not complete unless it has been sung by Mary Coughlan.”  – Melody Maker

 

“Her talent is awesome.”  – The London Times

 

“Mary’s live performances have to be seen to be believed.” – NME

 

 

 

It all started 37 Years ago………

 

 

37 Years later, and the voice is better than ever !!!!………